A diverting whodunit bolstered by a laudable, complex detective.
A California private eye puts himself and others in peril while digging into a triple-murder cold case in this first installment of a thriller series.
Chad Kidd, a former Palm Springs cop-turned-private investigator, looks into the murder of Chloe Nelson from four years ago. She was the teenage daughter of Kidd’s former colleague Phil Nelson, a retired lieutenant. Firefighters found the charred remains of Chloe; her mother (and Phil’s ex-wife), Diana; and Diana’s boyfriend, Dan Brady, at a house fire, though all three were dead from gunshots. But as Chloe’s burning body was in a wheelbarrow in the front yard, Kidd and Phil surmise the teen was the primary target. There’s a slew of people for Kidd to interrogate, from Lizzy Grant (the teen’s best friend who’s devoted a Facebook page to finding the killer) to Jay Strait (Chloe’s ex-boyfriend who Lizzy and Phil are convinced is guilty). Before long, an anonymous Facebook message and phone call threaten Lizzy to stay quiet, and Kidd notices a Dodge Charger following him around. While the PI updates his growing suspect list, he also notes a possible tie between drug dealers and the murder case. The increasingly dangerous investigation ultimately leads to further intimidation, more than one kidnapping, and, sadly, additional deaths. Perry (To the North, 2018, etc.) gets this swift mystery off to a running start, with Kidd already investigating and Phil providing case details. Readers only know as much as the detective, and identifying the culprit who committed the murders isn’t easy. Moreover, Kidd becomes a more complicated character as the story continues. He starts a dalliance with someone connected to the case and is flustered by the impending release of Goran Markovic, who had been awaiting trial for gunning down Kidd’s cop fiancee, Erin Jade. Though the mystery eventually unravels on its own, it’s still a treat to watch the sleuth in frequent scenes of interrogations. His easygoing demeanor tends to make others talkative, and he has a holstered Glock 17 in case the interviewee turns aggressive.
A diverting whodunit bolstered by a laudable, complex detective.Pub Date: April 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-336820-8
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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